Share this:

John Steinbeck - Biographical

John Steinbeck (1902-1968), born in
Salinas, California, came from a family of moderate means. He
worked his way through college at Stanford University
but never graduated. In 1925 he went to New York, where he tried
for a few years to establish himself as a free-lance writer, but
he failed and returned to California. After publishing some
novels and short stories, Steinbeck first became widely known
with Tortilla Flat (1935), a series of humorous stories
about Monterey paisanos.

Steinbeck's novels can all be classified as social novels dealing
with the economic problems of rural labour, but there is also a
streak of worship of the soil in his books, which does not always
agree with his matter-of-fact sociological approach. After the
rough and earthy humour of Tortilla Flat, he moved on to
more serious fiction, often aggressive in its social criticism,
to In Dubious Battle (1936), which deals with the strikes
of the migratory fruit pickers on California plantations. This
was followed by Of Mice and Men (1937), the story of the
imbecile giant Lennie, and a series of admirable short stories
collected in the volume The Long Valley (1938). In 1939 he
published what is considered his best work, The Grapes of
Wrath, the story of Oklahoma tenant farmers who, unable to
earn a living from the land, moved to California where they
became migratory workers.

Among his later works should be mentioned East of Eden
(1952), The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), and
Travels with Charley (1962), a travelogue in which
Steinbeck wrote about his impressions during a three-month tour
in a truck that led him through forty American states. He died in
New York City in 1968.

This autobiography/biography was written
at the time of the award and first
published in the book series Les
Prix Nobel.
It was later edited and republished in Nobel Lectures. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.